Philippa Kaur

Before I began a PhD in Indigenous knowledge and the biology of invasive species at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 2015, I had an existential crisis. I worked for an agency that managed invasive plant species — but despite our efforts, some invasive species would inevitably come back, or a new invader would take over. For me, it was a moment to question the point of eradicating such species without a holistic land-management plan in place.Since then, my scientific journey has been about connecting my Western science to the Indigenous world view I’ve inherited as a Nlaka’pamux woman of mixed ancestry. Now, when I go out into the field as a researcher, I involve archaeologists, elders, soil scientists, plant scientists and historical ecologists so that we can use their knowledge — to understand how this land was managed in the past and how it should be managed in the future. Instead of saying, “How do we get rid of this invasive plant?”, we ask, “What do culturally important local plant species need to flourish?”.
How I use science to protect my people’s birthright
In this image, taken last August, I’m standing on land that’s being restored by the Cowichan Estuary Restoration Project, the largest of its type ever to occur on Vancouver Island. Two kilometres of dikes have been removed from the estuary to reconnect it to wetlands. In 2022, camas, a bright purple flower and an important fibre source for coastal Indigenous peoples, bloomed throughout the estuary. The Cowichan Tribes’ land staff and I then realized that this estuary had been an important food source for the local Indigenous peoples. We had to rethink the restoration project.Now, community-based researchers, elders and knowledge keepers are informing what we do next. Instead of adhering to a post-colonial baseline of restoration, we combine remote-sensing technologies with oral histories to purposefully shape lands, guided by community values and needs. More

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT
08 January 2024

Young southern pig-tailed macaques, an endangered species, are less likely to reach their first birthday if they spend time on plantations. More

Download the Nature Podcast 27 December 2023In this episode:00:54 Franklin’s real roleWhen it comes to the structure of DNA, everyone thinks they know Rosalind Franklin’s role in its discovery. The story goes that her crucial data was taken by James Watson without her knowledge, helping him and Francis Crick solve the structure. However, new evidence has revealed that this wasn’t really the case. Rosalind Franklin was not a ‘wronged heroine’, she was an equal contributor to the discovery.Nature Podcast: 25 April 2023Comment: What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure14:37 An automated way to monitor wildlife recoveryTo prevent the loss of wildlife, forest restoration is key, but monitoring how well biodiversity actually recovers is incredibly difficult. Now though, a team has collected recordings of animal sounds to determine the extent of the recovery. However, while using these sounds to identify species is an effective way to monitor, it’s also labour intensive. To overcome this, they trained an AI to listen to the sounds, and found that although it was less able to identify species, its findings still correlated well with wildlife recovery, suggesting that it could be a cost-effective and automated way to monitor biodiversity.Nature Podcast: 25 October 2023Research article: Müller et al.27:11 Research HighlightsThe first brain recording from a freely swimming octopus, and how a Seinfeld episode helped scientists to distinguish the brain regions involved in understanding and appreciating humour.Research Highlight: How to measure the brain of an octopusResearch Highlight: One brain area helps you to enjoy a joke — but another helps you to get it30:24 Why multisensory experiences can make stronger memoriesIt’s recognized that multisensory experiences can create strong memories and that later-on, a single sensory experience can trigger memories of the whole event, like a specific smell conjuring a visual memory. But the neural mechanisms behind this are not well understood. Now, a team has shown that rich sensory experiences can create direct neural circuit between the memory regions involved with different senses. This circuit increases memory strength in the flies, and helps explain how sense and memories are interlinked.Nature Podcast: 25 April 2023Research article: Okray et al.38:58 Briefing ChatHow elephant seals catch some shut-eye while diving.New York Times: Elephant Seals Take Power Naps During Deep Ocean DivesSubscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday.Never miss an episode. Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast app. An RSS feed for the Nature Podcast is available too. More

In the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, armed men wearing balaclavas and wielding firearms intimidated me and two other journalists on a remote riverbank near the Colombian border in February. We had ventured into the rainforest to investigate the surge in violence and illegal mining and drug trafficking that the Amazon has witnessed since 2016, and to map the presence of cross-border armed groups. We are part of Amazon Underworld, a media alliance comprising more than 30 professionals.We knew that the region harboured shotgun-carrying gold miners who illegally dredge the river with gargantuan barges, and Colombian guerrillas who cross into Brazil to shake the miners down for gold. But the armed individuals who stopped us were affiliated with the state — a rogue military police unit that oversees and shields illegal mining operations. Working outside the law, they amass millions of dollars in gold payments annually. There, in their shadowy domain, no one who asks questions is welcome.The leader of the armed outfit demanded that we delete all the photos we had taken during two days of observing mining barges, before seizing our memory cards. Fortunately, we had a hidden backup.
Saving the Amazon: how science is helping Indigenous people protect their homelands
Illegal mining is but one part of a complex web of transnational organized crime, corruption and resource extraction that is threatening the Amazon — a crucial climate regulator. Yet improving security in the Amazon was missing from the agenda at COP28, the 2023 United Nations climate summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Addressing this security dilemma is pivotal to safeguarding the Amazon rainforest, the populations it shelters and the global climate.Violence and criminal activity in the Amazon have worsened since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when governments and law enforcement prioritized pandemic control over reducing organized crime. The rise in violence coincided with the 2019–22 Brazilian government of then-president Jair Bolsonaro, who openly called for mining Indigenous lands. In 2023, annual deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon decreased sharply. But the year also saw forest fires rage across Brazil and Bolivia, and news articles featuring images of malnourished Indigenous Yanomami children, whose ancestral lands are besieged by gold miners. In Colombia’s southern Putumayo region — a crucial corridor for the cocaine industry — three or more people have been killed on 21 separate occasions since 2020, mainly because of a ruthless territorial struggle between two armed factions.The allure of illicit profits has enticed urban gangs from Brazil, such as Primeiro Comando da Capital from São Paulo and Comando Vermelho from Rio de Janeiro and rural guerrilla outfits from Colombia to the Amazon. Some initially came for the cocaine — its prime ingredient, coca, can be grown there — but stayed for the gold and to launder drug profits. Especially in border areas with minimal state presence, illicit activities intersect with legitimate cattle and agricultural enterprises. Indigenous peoples are often put at risk when these activities overlap with their lands.
The scientists restoring a gold-mining disaster zone in the Peruvian Amazon
One of these populations is the Yuri-Passé, an uncontacted Indigenous group living in a protected national park on the Colombian side of the Puré River, near to where the armed men tried to intimidate us on the Brazilian side. National park rangers abandoned their posts in 2020 after threats from a Colombian guerrilla faction, leaving the Yuri-Passé peoples unprotected. The community, of about 400 people, faces an existential threat from diseases, pollution and attacks by gold miners and armed groups.This Amazonian region on the Colombian–Brazilian border is not an exception. Our investigation found crime groups in 70% of municipalities in the borderlands of Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela. Often, Indigenous youths are brought into organized crime by force or are enticed by non-governmental armed groups that supplant the state, carry out rudimentary ‘justice’ and levy taxes on the region’s inhabitants and economic activities.Authorities have so far failed to keep up with the increasingly complex criminal networks. Criminal organizations now forge alliances across borders despite cultural and ideological differences. The escalating violence and criminal presence could undermine international backing for conservation projects.Solutions to these multifaceted issues might not be simple, but practical steps exist. Nations must cooperate to guard against this violence. They must support local communities — by increasing the state’s presence in remote areas and promoting health care, education and sustainable economic development — and help them to safeguard the rainforest. For example, Indigenous peoples in Peru and Brazil are using drones and GPS devices to monitor their land and detect threats from violent invaders.Indigenous peoples are the Amazon’s best forest guardians, but they need more legally demarcated lands and protective measures, such as funding for Indigenous guards and rapid response and emergency protocols. In 2022, Colombia and Brazil saw the most deaths of environmental and land defenders worldwide. Developing effective strategies to enhance cooperation between law enforcement and local populations must also be a priority.To prevent irreversible damage to the rainforest and the climate, security in the Amazon must be added to the global climate agenda. More

A fire in Canada in 2023. The country experienced its worst wildfires on record, contributing to record carbon dioxide emissions.Credit: Chine Nouvelle/SIPA/Shutterstock

Global forest fires emitted 33.9 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) between 2001 and 2022, according to a report by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). This makes the CO2 emissions generated by forest fires each year higher than those from burning fossil fuels in Japan — the world’s sixth-largest CO2 emitter. Driving the emissions spike was the growing frequency of “extreme forest-fire events”.Xu Wenru, a co-author and a landscape ecologist at the CAS Institute of Applied Ecology, based in Shenyang, China, says that the term ‘extreme forest fires’ generally refers to blazes that, compared with an average forest fire, burn through a larger area, last for a longer time and leave a bigger impact.Xu and her colleagues found that the growth in emissions had been mostly fuelled by an uptick in infernos on the edge of rainforests between 5 and 20º S and in boreal forests above 45º N.In particular, the emissions from boreal-forest blazes “showed a rapidly growing trend”, she says.The increased numbers of forest fires was partially driven by the frequent heatwaves and droughts caused by climate change, Xu says. “In turn, the CO2 emitted by forest fires contributes to global warming, creating a feedback loop between the two.”Humans also played a part. “Many forest fires were actually caused by humans when they were, for example, building fires to get warm at night, lighting fireworks or discarding cigarette butts,” says Xu.Zhou Tianjun, a meteorologist at the CAS’s Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Beijing, found the report shocking. In particular, he points to a figure showing that, on average, the area of forest burnt by fires between 2001 and 2022 was 11 times the size of the forests planted by humans during that period.“Tree plantation has been regarded as an important way to increase carbon sinks, but this figure shows that humans’ efforts could be offset by natural forest fires,” he says.

Source: Chinese Academy of Sciences

Record-breaking firesThe report singles out ten extreme forest-fire incidents that occurred between 2018 and 2023, each of which sent more than 600 million tonnes of CO2 into the air (see ‘Most-affected countries’). They were concentrated in five countries, all of which have vast forests: Russia, Brazil, Canada, Australia and Indonesia.Topping the emissions list is this year’s record-breaking conflagration that ripped through Canada, home to 28% of the world’s boreal forests. In 2023, more than 6,700 fires have broken out across the country, burning through a total of 18.5 million hectares, almost half the size of Norway.The CAS report found that the forest fires in Canada this year had emitted more than 1.5 billion tonnes of CO2 as of October (see ‘Extreme forest fires’), surpassing the emissions from all forest fires in the country over the previous 22 years combined.

Source: Chinese Academy of Sciences

The effects of forest fires and other types of wildfire are expected to worsen across the world in the decades to come.Wang Yuhang, an atmospheric scientist and professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, says the report complements his work1 which “indicates a roughly 20% rise in global burnt area by the 2050s compared to the 2000s”.“More surprisingly, global fire carbon emissions are expected to double, highlighting the emergence of fire as a more significant carbon source at short-term timescales in the future,” Wang adds.Wang echoes the report’s suggestion that countries should include carbon emissions from forest fires into their national climate plans and set up a monitoring, reporting and verification system for such emissions.Given the scale of emissions that they generate, forest fires have become a source of CO2 emissions that “cannot be ignored”, Xu says. More

The Hawaiian crow, or ʻalalā (Corvus hawaiiensis), has been pushed to the brink of extinction by waves of human migration through the Pacific. It exists only in captive breeding programmes in 2023.Credit: ZSSD/Minden Pictures via Alamy

Around one in nine bird species has gone extinct in the past 126,000 years, according to a study published today1 in Nature Communications, and humans probably drove most of those extinctions. The findings suggest the rate of bird extinctions is more than double the number estimated previously — and that more than half of the extinct bird species were never documented.The global magnitude of these previously undetected extinctions is likely to “come as a shock to many”, says Jamie Wood, a terrestrial ecologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia. “The sobering thing is that this estimate could actually be conservative,” he says.Over centuries, humans have triggered waves of extinctions among birds and other animals through land clearing, hunting and introducing non-native species. Islands have been particularly badly affected: 90% of known bird extinctions have occurred in these isolated ecosystems. But because birds have lightweight, hollow bones, their remains tend not to be preserved well as fossils. As a result, most analyses of bird extinctions have relied instead on written observational evidence. These records began only around 500 years ago, which makes it difficult to build a picture of species losses over longer periods.Rob Cooke, an ecological modeller at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in Wallingford, and his colleagues built a model of bird extinctions by combining documented extinctions, fossil records and estimates of undiscovered extinctions across 1,488 islands. The team factored in a number of predictors for species richness — including island size, climate and geographical isolation — when estimating undiscovered extinctions.The model suggested that around 1,300–1,500 bird species — about 12% of the total worldwide — have become extinct since the Late Pleistocene (which was an epoch roughly 126,000–12,000 years ago). Human activities are likely to have caused the vast majority of these extinctions. The researchers also estimated that 55% of these vanished species would not have been discovered by humans or left any trace in the fossil record. The sheer scale of the global loss of birds came as a surprise, says Cooke. “Humans have had a much wider impact on bird diversity than previously thought,” he says.Pacific hardest hitThe authors found that almost two-thirds of all bird extinctions occurred in the Pacific region. Three major extinction waves have occurred since the Late Pleistocene, and the most intense of these waves occurred just over 700 years ago, when people first arrived on islands in the eastern Pacific — particularly Hawaii, the Marquesas Islands and New Zealand. At this time, extinction rates were 80 times higher than would have been expected if humans had not arrived. Cooke says that the introduction of rodents and domestic animals probably led to the loss of species that were well documented during this period, such as the high-billed crow (Corvus impluviatus), which once inhabited Hawaii.Developing an understanding of how many species have been lost over time could help policymakers to set biodiversity targets, says Folmer Bokma, an evolutionary biologist at Karlstad University in Sweden.Cooke says that the findings offer important lessons for tracking and conserving the bird species that remain on the planet today. “Whether or not further bird species will go extinct is up to us,” he adds. More

To lay eggs, Clanwilliam sandfish (Labeo seeberi) swim upstream to gentler, shallower tributaries of the Doring/Olifants river system in the Western Cape and Northern Cape provinces of South Africa. Local people say it was once an epic event: the water seemed to change colour as thousands of sandfish migrated upstream. Now, however, those numbers have shrunk to dangerous levels.That’s where I come in. My PhD at South Africa’s University of Cape Town is a collaboration with the Saving Sandfish project, run by a non-governmental organization called the Freshwater Research Centre in Cape Town — so I am also a conservationist.Human activity, climate change and thirsty invasive plants, are draining the rivers. As newly hatched sandfish try to swim downstream, they now get stuck in shallow pools, making them vulnerable to predators such as bass species introduced into the river system for sport fishing in the 1900s.The sandfish population has declined by more than 90% since we began keeping count in 2013. They’re now classified as endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.When the river starts to dry up, we scoop out young sandfish and put them into buckets of water, then move them by truck to one of six pre-prepared nurseries donated by local people. In this photo, I’m lifting a fish from one of those reservoirs. The support from local people is amazing.Once the sandfish are large enough to be less threatened by the bass, we return them to the wider ecosystem.We’re at an early stage, but the data so far show the project has been successful. We’ve rescued some 36,000 young sandfish over the past three years and have released almost 3,000. Last year, we got 77 readings from fish coming back from the group we released into the wild. This year, 222 have come back so far. I’m looking forward to adding to those numbers next year. More

In early 2022, ecologist Bohdan Prots was ready to begin a bold new project to restore ecosystems around the Chornobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine. Prots and his team were preparing to recreate lost wetlands there in an effort to rewild them and cut the risks of wildfires that spread radioactivity. His first step would be to survey the wildlife in the thickets of pines, birch, black alder and willow trees.But in February, the work came to a sudden halt when Russia invaded and immediately occupied the region around Chornobyl, which lies about 100 kilometres north of Kyiv. Hundreds of researchers and other workers were forced to leave. By the time Prots finally returned this April, he found armed soldiers guarding the route to his study site, which was studded with Ukrainian landmines. Prots says he never expected to find himself doing conservation work in a war zone, but “you need to work in any condition that’s possible”, he says.The war has devastated Ukraine and hobbled research nationwide, but the impacts on science in the Chornobyl region are particularly stark. For decades, the Chornobyl exclusion zone, a region that has been largely empty of people since the 1986 nuclear disaster, had been intensely studied by researchers keen to understand the long-term effects of radiation and how ecosystems change when unperturbed. The zone had developed a reputation as a unique natural laboratory and Soviet, Ukrainian and international researchers had accrued radiation and ecological data sets over more than 30 years.
‘In case I die, I need to publish this paper’: scientist who left the lab to fight in Ukraine
The invasion shattered that research, as scientists fled, data collection was interrupted and labs were looted by Russian soldiers. Ukraine retook the region after just five weeks but, because the exclusion zone lies on a strategically important route from Belarus to Kyiv, it has endured months of environmental damage and military fortification. “Most of the scientific activity has come to a screeching halt,” says Timothy Mousseau, an ecologist at University of South Carolina, Columbia, who has studied Chornobyl since 2000. “The area has absolutely been decimated.”Now, as the war heads towards its third year, some researchers are finding creative ways to restart their studies — but the work is difficult and the environment has changed. Scientists at the Frankfurt Zoological Society in Germany, for example, are analysing footage from camera traps located in the Chornobyl Biosphere Reserve, a protected area for wildlife research that covers two-thirds of the exclusion zone. They hope to use the data to assess the war’s impact on animal behaviour. “It was an unexpected experiment,” says Denys Vyshnevskyi, head of the reserve’s science department.Accidental science zoneWhen Chornobyl’s reactor 4 exploded on 26 April 1986 in what was then part of the Soviet Union, the resulting fire ejected radioactive isotopes that contaminated 155,000 square kilometres of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, and caused spikes in radioactivity as far away as Canada and Japan (see ‘Chornobyl in a conflict’). Authorities eventually evacuated an area of 4,760 square kilometres: around 2,600 square kilometres of northern Ukraine became the Chornobyl exclusion zone, with the rest in Belarus. Access to the reactor and to badly contaminated areas remained tightly controlled, but a changing cast of more than 3,000 workers came in. Some built a protective sarcophagus around the reactor’s ruins; others worked as guards, firefighters or tour guides for a growing stream of international tourists curious to visit the region.

Source: Institute for the Study of War

The Chornobyl accident created a rare opportunity to study the effects of radiation. The exclusion zone became home to a cluster of research institutes that have been supported by Ukrainian authorities and partnerships with overseas universities since Ukraine became independent in 1991. Air, water and soil monitoring sites are scattered across the zone. From these, scientists have built up decades-long data sets on the decay, dispersal and impact of radionuclides.The data have shown that concentrations now vary from hazardous to low levels across the zone, and the pattern still reflects the wind direction immediately after the explosion — with a narrow smear of high radiation west of the exploded reactor, following the path of the radioactive plume. Researchers have also examined the long-term effects of radiation exposure on wildlife — with conflicting results. A 2009 study, for example, found that the abundance of insects and spiders in the Chornobyl zone declined with increasing radiation1; other studies found only subtle effects on ecosystems2.
War shattered Ukrainian science — its rebirth is now taking shape
The long-running data sets are the bedrock of Chornobyl’s status as an internationally important laboratory, says Jim Smith, an environmental scientist at the University of Portsmouth, UK, who has studied Chornobyl since 1990. In 2022, Smith’s team used data from 35 years of groundwater monitoring to show that radionuclides are no longer at dangerous levels across much of the zone, but that a few hotspots remain close to the reactor3. Research from the exclusion zone has also informed the development of nuclear power plants and nuclear emergency planning around the world, as well as the response to the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011. “So it is a resource that is of benefit globally, not just locally,” says Mike Wood, an ecologist at the University of Salford, UK, who worked at Chornobyl.Early indicatorsResearchers at Chornobyl detected signs of Russia’s impending invasion four months before hostilities even began, says Mousseau. He and others were monitoring the movement of wolves and other wildlife using about 100 motion-activated cameras. Some in the Ukrainian exclusion zone picked up Russian troops making incursions across the border, prompting the team to alert the authorities — a fact that Mousseau was allowed to reveal publicly only in May.When the Russian army stormed the border on 24 February 2022, it immediately captured the exclusion zone. Sergii Paskevych, deputy director of research at the Kyiv-based Institute for Safety Problems of Nuclear Power Plants (ISP NPP) of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, was in the Chornobyl area with his colleagues that night. Amid fear and confusion, “all the main stations of the institute decided to evacuate everyone. We left everything in Chornobyl that night,” Paskevych says. As they drove away at 6 a.m., they saw Ukrainian troops arriving and placing explosives under bridges that, hours later, would be destroyed. “After that, I realized that it’s serious,” says Paskevych. “It’s not a simulation. It’s real war.”

Zoologist Dennis Vyshnevskyi sets a photo-trap in the ghost city Pripyat near to Chernobyl Power Plant.Credit: Genya Savilov/AFP via Getty

During Russia’s short occupation of the exclusion zone, the country’s forces looted and damaged many research labs and facilities. In Chornobyl town, for example, they destroyed servers and stole hard drives from Ecocentre, a laboratory that led radiation monitoring across the zone, says Gennady Laptev, a radiological monitoring expert at the Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Institute in Kyiv.This interrupted the long-term data collection in the region, and some researchers fear that historical data could be permanently lost. “Computers were stolen, records were destroyed,” says Smith. Wildlife studies were also disrupted, because researchers were unable to access field sites or retrieve many of the camera traps — some of which stopped working when their batteries ran out.Slow returnOn 31 March 2022, Ukraine announced that it had regained control of the exclusion zone, and from June that year, some researchers started making efforts to restart their work. But the return has been slow and halting. Work is punctuated by the sound of explosions and gunfire. “It is difficult to live under rocket attacks,” says Valery Kashparov, director of the Ukrainian Institute of Agricultural Radiology in Kyiv.The biggest issue now, say many scientists, is a lack of staff. Although scientists do not have to serve in the military, Paskevych and many others have volunteered to fight. At the ISP NPP, a skeleton crew of essential workers is now on site evaluating the safety risks, says ISP NPP radiobiologist Olena Pareniuk. And collaborators abroad are unable to return. “For most of us, our institutions aren’t overly keen on us saying ‘Right, we’d like to go and do fieldwork in an area where there remains active conflict’,” says Wood.
Rebuilding Ukrainian science can’t wait — here’s how to start
Access to research sites around Chornobyl is another huge problem. Scientists can enter around half of the exclusion zone, estimates Vyshnevskyi. About one-third is currently under strict military control, says Prots, including areas close to the Belarusian border. But in reality, many research sites are inaccessible because much of the land is now dotted with mines or tightly controlled by the army, which fears a Russian invasion through Belarus.Sharing the exclusion zone with the military comes with risks. Twice in the three months after Russia’s withdrawal, researchers from the Chornobyl Reserve were apprehended by Ukrainian soldiers, says Vyshnevskyi. The second time they were blindfolded and detained for a few hours before being returned to a local police checkpoint. Since then, scientists have learnt to give advanced warning of their movements, he says.A handful of Ukrainian researchers have made initial forays back into the forests to try to get ecological monitoring systems back online. Prots says the soldiers have been good-natured — if a little surprised — to find scientists out looking for bats and beavers in the middle of a war zone. Mousseau, whose wildlife cameras happened to pick up early signs of Russian troops, says that he and his team are now trying to install more. “That might be useful for Ukrainian security services as well as our wildlife studies,” he says.Vyshnevskyi says that his main focus now “is to assess the damage to the natural environment from the occupation”. Chornobyl researchers have joined with other scientists in an effort launched by Ukraine’s environment ministry in July 2022 to track military actions that cause environmental harm, from groundwater contamination to forest fires. By early December, a network of thousands of citizen reporters had submitted at least 2,600 reports of environmental harm, causing an estimated €52.4 billion (US$56.6 billion) worth of damage. Wood says that when international researchers are able to return to the zone, one obvious action will be to repeat work such as wildlife tracking, to quantify the changes. They will want to know “what was the zone like when we last did this? What’s it like now?”, he says.Wetland defencesProts is one of those trying to restart their work. The nuclear power plant is located in Polesia, Europe’s largest inland wetland wilderness. But long before it was built, and starting in earnest in the 1920s, the Soviet Union drained vast areas for farming.In the past few years, thanks to the drier land and climate change, wildfires have torn through forests around Chornobyl. Research conducted after fires swept through in 2020 suggests that the radionuclides released by the blazes pose little threat to people outside the exclusion zone4, but some local scientists want to see further research. They’re concerned that future fires could damage ecosystems, release carbon from peatlands and, by moving radionuclides around, complicate efforts to study — and eventually reopen — the zone.

The city of Pripyat was abandoned after the 1986 nuclear accident, with homes and the stadium left empty.Credit: Patrick Ahlborn/DeFodi Images News via Getty

Prots wants to study whether reintroducing wetlands to the area would cut those potential risks. This would follow on from work done since 2007 on a wetland conservation and restoration project in the Carpathian mountain forests in western Ukraine5. Since 2021, Prots has been funded by the Whitley Fund for Nature, a UK conservation charity, to study whether rewilding could safely and affordably prevent wildfires, as part of an international coalition including Smith and Laptev.Before the invasion, Prots had finalized plans for a pilot project, due to start in 2022, that involved clearing silt and debris from the ageing network of canals and sluice gates and using the waters to flood an 8-square-kilometre patch of former swampland near the Pripyat River. He had hoped this would create conditions that would lure back the Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber), a rodent whose dam-building can support wetland ecosystems in the long term. “If we start this restoration, beavers will come,” he says. During the pilot, the team planned to observe the effects of restored wetland on wildlife and carefully monitor radionuclides to ensure that flooding did not cause dangerous levels to run off into surrounding areas. Then, if successful, the approach could be scaled up to restore wetlands across the exclusion zone.
Ukrainian science has survived against the odds — now let’s rebuild together
To Prots’ surprise, as the war drags on, his proposal has drawn fresh interest from firefighters keen to avert increasingly frequent wildfires, and from Ukraine’s military, which hopes that swamps will provide effective defences against Russian troops. “Many people are recognizing now that in this border area, the best war defence would be having natural habitats,” says Prots. “This could be a big win of this war: to have restored moist wetlands.”In theory, Prots’ project could begin as soon as Ukraine’s military can spare the services of a ‘sapper’ to clear the tracks of explosives, which were placed to prevent Russian troop advances. But the team’s hope of starting this summer were dashed. The sappers were needed elsewhere, especially following Ukraine’s counteroffensive, which encountered heavily mined Russian lines.Uncertain futureWith no end to the war in sight, some researchers fear that science at Chornobyl will never recover to pre-war levels and that many of the scientists who left the country will not return. Sergey Gashchak, deputy director of science at the Chornobyl Center’s International Radioecology Laboratory, says that research was already struggling with insufficient funding from the Ukrainian government and a long-term decline in science education, resulting in fewer qualified scientists and little funding for PhDs. The war has finally “killed” science here, Gashchak wrote in an e-mail. “No projects, no money, no people.”Others are more optimistic that their data collection and studies can be resumed — if the break is not too long. “If it’s another year, let’s say, it wouldn’t be that big a problem, because many of the ecological dynamics are not that fast,” says Germán Orizaola, a zoologist at the University of Oviedo, Spain, who studies amphibians in Chornobyl. But Orizaola worries that the interruption of international collaborations by the war and the COVID-19 pandemic will result in a lasting reduction in foreign funding, which was a key source of support. “All that money is not reaching Ukraine now,” says Orizaola.Whenever the conflict ends, scars around Chornobyl are likely to persist for some time. Along the Ukraine–Belarusian border, a 100-metre-wide strip of vegetation has been razed and now divides the forest. Prots says these zones are laid with explosives, which animals triggered routinely during his visit, and he and other researchers fear the strip could become entrenched. Prots compares the zone of deforestation to the barbed-wire-topped barriers of the old Iron Curtain. “We are facing, now, this completely new reality.” More